Common problems associated with local municipalities, including poor service delivery, incorrect billings, tender process irregularities and housing delivery gone wrong, can be overcome through closer collaboration between municipalities and the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA), the council said on Thursday.

During a recent panel discussion around municipal service delivery challenges, ECSA argued that it had a set code of conduct that had to be adhered to by all registered engineering practitioners in their engineering activities.

It further emphasised its role as regulator, which included setting standards, registering persons who meet educational requirements in candidate categories and registering persons in professional categories who demonstrate competency against the prescribed standards for the different categories.

The council believed that opportunities existed for closer collaboration between municipalities and the regulating body to ensure that the constitutional right to service delivery of every South African is met.

The members of the panel, comprising Ekurhuleni Mayor Mondli Gungubele; Midvaal Mayor Bongani Baloyi, in his capacity as South African Local Government Association chairperson, Deputy Public Protector Advocate Kevin Malunga and ECSA education standards and policies executive John Cato, discussed the challenges faced by municipalities in ensuring a seamless flow of service delivery and an ongoing focus on quality infrastructure development.

Baloyi indicated that, in some instances, unregistered engineers had delivered unacceptable work, resulting in municipalities being unable to provide some critical services to its constituents. 

“Our primary aim is to ensure the provision of services to communities in a sustainable manner, with our residents as the primary focus of our work.

“We have seen great achievements in the last 15 years, but we still need to do more work. It may appear as if we have not met all of our targets; however, the population has grown and this has meant that we need to keep improving our delivery to meet the growing demands of the communities we serve,” Baloyi stated.

Gungubele said the Ekurhuleni municipality’s ability to provide quality service had been impaired by poor standards of work.

“It costs our municipality more to fix engineering work that has not been executed professionally in the first place. In Ekurhuleni, the focus is on how we can make the entire value chain of service delivery simpler, better and faster,” he added.

Through the construction of the OR Tambo Cultural Precinct, the municipality had demonstrated that there was local engineering expertise that could offer services to its community, such as a solar farm producing 200 kW of energy and efficient technologies such as rainwater harvesting and wastewater management. 

“This facility generates its own resources and recycles the waste as well,” Gungubele noted.

ECSA recommended the “professionalisation” of systems at municipal level, which would ensure that professionals were empowered to do their jobs through an appreciation by administrators of the nature and value of engineering.

The industry body stressed the need for consideration to be given to creating a central tender awarding system at a national level, which must then be supported by professional assessment and consultation.

“There are also challenges at an operational level for engineers working within local government and we would recommend greater delegation of tasks, as technical staff is not given the authority to make importance decisions – with decision-making being an integral part of the engineering process,” Cato said.

Engineers working in local government were often not in a position to sign off their projects and make decisions. “The need to return authority to line management cannot be overemphasised,” he added.